The word has gone out in Corinth
that there's a celebrity in pain in the vicinity. And when the groupies
who sniff for blood wounds among the incredibly famous arrive at her house,
Medea doesn't disappoint.

There she is, as embodied
with a harrowing lack of vanity by the brilliant Fiona Shaw, her recognizable
features smudged by unhappiness, her eyes hidden by the formal shield
of dark glasses, her mismatched wardrobe a thrown-on hash of running shoes,
a cardigan and a little print dress. Why, she might have stepped from
those pages of The National Enquirer devoted to stars foolish enough to
leave home without makeup. The question is: Will she talk to us? Will
she let us in on her truly sensational problems?

You bet she will. How satisfying,
after all, can revenge be unless you have an audience to reflect it, to
magnify it, to turn it into legend? Without their urging, how will you
know who you really are?

In the thrilling Abbey Theater
production of Euripides' ''Medea,'' which runs at the Harvey Theater of
the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Oct. 12, Greek tragedy's most spectacularly
vengeful woman has rematerialized in the dawning years of the 21st century.
And it is, to tell the truth, a little frightening to see how comfortably
this volcanically uncomfortable woman fits into the world of today.

What Ms. Shaw and the director,
Deborah Warner, who collaborated so memorably on their staging of T. S.
Eliot's ''Waste Land,'' have achieved here seems so obvious, when you
think about it, that you're amazed it hasn't been done before. For this
''Medea'' homes in on the parallels between the very form of Greek tragedy
-- with its dialogue between uncommon heroes and heroines and the common
folk of the chorus -- and an age in which private breakdowns, breakups
and humiliations have become public rituals.

Of course if this were the
only point of Ms. Warner's ''Medea,'' it wouldn't have turned out to be
the most essential ticket of this theater season. This isn't one of those
stagings in which a clever concept reduces characters to glossy illustrations.

The miracle of this ''Medea''
is how completely it integrates its ideas of a latter-day culture of celebrity
into a classic text, freshly translated by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic
Raphael, without ever seeming to warp the spirit of the original. The
anxious perfume that saturates this production is a compound of the passion,
terror and existential ambivalence that have plagued humans for as long
as they have been able to think.

Ms. Shaw's Medea has little
in common with the usual majestically angry sorceress who is guided by
one idée fixe: to avenge herself on her husband, Jason, for whom she betrayed
her homeland and who has now left her for the young princess of Corinth.
There is scant evidence of the commanding icy intellect so elegantly incarnated
by Diana Rigg in Jonathan Kent's production of a proto-feminist ''Medea''
on Broadway in 1994.

It's not that you doubt the
intelligence of Ms. Shaw's Medea. But her lacerating misfortunes have
broken the circuits of that intelligence, and her responses are a toxic
jumble. She seems to wear her nerves outside her skin. Numbness and excruciating
pain, shrill anger and mordant, bizarre humor flit across her raw features
in disjunctive parade.

Set in a half-finished courtyard
littered with children's toys and cinder blocks (the designer is Tom Pye),
suggesting a life interrupted, the entire production seems to occur in
that heightened, instinct-addling realm that occurs during times of emergency.
The evening begins in a state of breathlessness that never really lets
up. And as upsetting as much of it is, the show radiates such high theatrical
energy and insight that you can't help grinning through most of it.

The first image is of Medea's
Nurse (Siobhan McCarthy), represented here as a student au pair type,
rushing onto the stage with a handful of knives. She is also, it turns
out, carrying bottles of pills. And she proceeds to hide these commonplace
household objects, which in this context have suddenly turned threatening.

This interpolated scene is
inspired in its banal immediacy, translating abstract terror into specific
and familiar physical terms. You can't help feeling like a visitor who
has showed up at just the wrong moment. Of course, you keep staring. And
if you don't, there's the chorus of five townswomen who emerge from the
audience and swarm onto the stage as if to act as your proxy.

They have the feverish look
of fans addicted to real-life soap operas, like the kind of people who
rushed to the site of Nicole Simpson's murder and stood in line for the
trial of Michael C. Skakel. Their relentless talk to Medea, shaped by
a sooty mix of empathy and prurience, seems perfectly natural. So, more
surprisingly, does Medea's willingness to respond to them.

Then again, as a notorious
exile now spurned by even the husband who brought her here, who else does
she have to talk to? Besides, as Jason (Jonathan Cake) later says nastily,
he and Medea have become people who would ''rather be sung about than
sing.''

This production acutely accents
the talk of reputation and fame and its rewards. And you can see that
Jason and, in her more befuddled way, Medea are quite keen to put forth
their respective versions of their lives together. Medea knows very well
she is playing to a crowd and, by extension, to history. She accepts as
her due the applause that the chorus gives after she has successfully
pleaded with Kreon (Struan Rodger), the king of Crete, to postpone her
exile.

If it sounds as if Ms. Shaw's
Medea is a smooth spinmeister, then I'm misrepresenting her. What's so
mesmerizing and truly frightening about her performance is how cogently
she evokes a mind that is anything but clear. This Medea is an all too
sensitive instrument played upon by overwhelming forces that come from
both without and within.

Among these is simple brute
lust. The superb Mr. Cake's vanity-driven Jason may not be his wife's
match in ingenuity. But he knows exactly where to touch Medea to turn
her into jelly. Their most rancorous arguments are punctuated by perverse
sexual sparks that threaten to subdue Medea into passivity. And then the
spell is broken, and she emerges all the more addled and angry.

The play's grotesque climax
(mercilessly rendered here), in which Medea murders her two sons, does
not seem a foregone conclusion. Ms. Shaw and Ms. Warner have created a
Medea who isn't even sure herself how she will act from one moment to
the next. There are stretches, as Medea rants about her diabolical plans
for vengeance, when you think, ''Oh, she's just playing,'' or to use the
preferred psychobabble, ''acting out.''

For this Medea has a wide-ranging
mind that, even in abject pain, keeps shifting perspectives on her. Suddenly,
without warning, she'll do something like pick up a toy gun and simulate
murder with a goofy smile. And she's funny when she's deriding her husband
and his bride-to-be, finding the idea of them so unspeakable that she's
reduced to making ''bleah'' and ''ick'' noises. But the noises also suggests
an eloquent woman for whom words are no longer adequate.

When, toward the play's end,
a messenger (Derek Hutchinson) arrives to describe the excruciating deaths
of Kreon and his daughter, Jason's intended, Ms. Shaw's face goes dead
white and still, showing flickers of gratification and just as often of
incomprehension that her plan has come to fruition.

And therein lies the real
genius of Ms. Shaw's portraiture. Real life seldom affords the tidy motives
of murder mysteries or the stark psychological blueprints of novels about
serial killers. And the recent spate of reality television serials have
confirmed that famous people are never just the cleanly drawn cartoons
we would like them to be. Witness the on-camera disintegration of Anna
Nicole Smith.

Ms. Shaw and Ms. Warner have
created one of the most human Medeas ever, precisely because they have
refused to simplify her. Medea's acts may be monstrous, but the woman
who performs them is a mass of confused impulses and thwarted drives that
elude easy categorization. It is this very blurriness that makes her so
vivid, so haunting and so damningly easy to identify with.